New Books in History

People who care about other places (and that’s not everyone) have always thought of Russia as a strange place. It doesn’t seem to “fit.” A good part of Russia is in Europe, but it’s not exactly “European.” Russia has natural resources galore, but it’s surprisingly poor. Russians have written a lot of great literature, but for most of Russian history most Russians have been illiterate. Russia has produced some great scientists, but it has also produced some catastrophically bad ones (see “Trofim Lysenko” for more). The most consistent of the Russian inconsistencies has to do, however, with politics. Russia has had a lot of very “enlightened” rulers. Peter, Catherine, Alexander (two of them), and, of course, Lenin and co. These folks took the best theories the West had to offer and put them into practice, or at least tried to. The results, however, were usually disastrous, and never so much so as in the case of the Bolsheviks. In the name of progress, they arguably created the most despotic state in history. Interestingly, many of the people who cared about other places–especially Western Leftists–didn’t notice this contradiction between theory and practice. Why? The ordinary answer (and, I should add, a quite convincing one) is that they loved the theory, so they were willing to overlook the practice. But, as Michael David-Fox shows in his highly original Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941 (Oxford University Press, 2011), that was not the only reason the Western Leftists got it wrong. Another reason, and one David-Fox explores in great detail using a remarkable range of archival sources, is that the Soviets built a PR machine to send the right message to the fellow-travelers. They wined them, dined them, and showed them the many (and carefully selected) victories of socialist labor. Which brings us to the most fascinating part of David-Fox’s book. The fact of the matter is that the Soviets, no matter how hard they tried, could not hide what came to be known among cynical Russians as “Soviet reality.” The Soviet Union in the 1920 and 1930s was a mess of titanic proportions. The Bolshevik elite knew it (they’d been to the West and often lived there), and so did the fellow-travellers. The Western visitors in David-Fox’s book saw “Soviet reality,” and sometimes they even wrote, disappointedly, about it while they were in the USSR. But when they got home, all this “Soviet reality” was forgotten, replaced by an image of a utopia in the making. It makes one wonder if the Soviets needed to worry about their image abroad at all, for that image was firmly evolved in the minds of Western Leftists before they ever arrived in the USSR and carried away when they left it. What happened in between arrival and departure didn’t seem to matter much.

When I was a kid I loved movies about Nazis who had escaped justice after the war. There was “The Marathon Man” (“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not going into that cavity. That nerve’s already dying.”). There was “The Boys from Brazil” (“The right Hitler for the right future! A Hitler tailor-made for the 1980s, 90s, 2000!”)  And there was “The ODESSA File” (“Germany believes she doesn’t need us now…but one day she’ll know that she does!”). “The ODESSA File” was my favorite because it explained what really happened, how the evil Nazis formed a super-secret group (Organisation der Ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen) to get themselves out of Germany so they could one day return to power. The trouble is that’s not what happened at all. In fact, there was no ODESSA. In 1947, someone tricked Nazi-hunter Simon Weisenthal into believing “ODESSA” existed (he was quite willing to be tricked). Then Fredrick Forsyth amplified the myth in his book “The ODESSA File” (1972). Then Hollywood gave the story the full Hollywood treatment in movie “The ODESSA File” (1974). Hollywood tricked me into believing it existed (I was quite willing to be tricked). If you want to know the truth about how the Nazis got away, read Gerald Steinacher remarkably thorough Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice (Oxford University Press, 2011). He shows that there was a sort of conspiracy to get the Nazis out, it just wasn’t very conspiratorial. Even before the war the Nazis (and the SS particularly) were thinking about how to get away from the crumbling Reich. They talked to one an other, made contacts abroad, and traded tips. After some experimenting with various routes, they determined one was far and away most effective: through Austria, into Italy, and then overseas. They had a lot of help. Some of it was for hire, for example in South Tyrol where a kind of Nazi-smuggling industry arose. Some was gratis, for example that offered by a German bishop in Rome. Add some bungling by the International Red Cross, some skullduggery by the OSS, some complicity by foreign powers (e.g., Argentina) seeking German “experts,” and–just like that–the “Ratlines” were clear and known to anyone paying attention. Steinacher shows that no ODESSA-like organization was necessary for the Nazis to escape. All they had to do was follow the well-trodden, clearly marked path that lead away from justice in Europe and into safety abroad. That’s more disturbing than ODESSA.  

The founding fathers–and mothers, sons and daughters–were British. Sort of. It’s true that they were subjects of the British crown, and that they looked, talked, acted and had the tastes of folks in London. But they were always different. Though they carried with them a sort of “British cultural package,” what they changed that cultural package, sometimes intentionally and sometimes accidentally. To draw an  evolutionary analogy, they “speciated,” that is, evolved into something new. But just what it was they did not know, not before the Revolution and for a long time after it. In her enlightening Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (Oxford UP, 2011), Kariann Akemi Yokota tells us how early “Americans” dealt with the problem of “American” identity. They were nothing if not conflicted: they recognized that British culture was much more sophisticated than their own, but they also sought to find virtue in American rudeness. One of the most interesting things about Kariann’s book is how she uses a variety of unusual sources to study this cultural anxiety–porcelain, maps, paintings, furniture, architecture, cloth, clothes, and other artifacts of “material culture.” Her analysis made me look at the “material culture” in my own house differently (“What in the world does a Dustbuster say about being an Amerian?”). Kariann’s book will make you think differently about how Americans became Americans.

You’ve got to be pretty creative to get anything like “holy war” out of the New Testament, what with all that trespass-forgiving, cheek-turning, and neighbor-loving. By all appearances Jesus didn’t want his followers to fight for their faith, but rather to die for it as he had. And during the first three centuries of Christianity–in the time of the Roman persecution–that’s just what they did. “To die in Christ is to live,” wrote the Apostle Paul. And it seems a lot of early Christians believed him for they sought martyrdom. Jesus passively gave his life; and they passively gave theirs. What could be more fitting? All this passivity makes the Crusades seem very strange indeed. If Christ’s message was one of peace, what in the world were Christians doing taking up arms in the his name? In his excellent Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse (Basic Books, 2011),  Jay Rubenstein explains that the reason they did so had everything to do with the conviction that the world was going to presently end. The Crusaders fervently believed that the closing chapter in temporal history upon them and that they had a role in bringing it to the right conclusion. They didn’t know exactly what that role was, but there were good hints in ancient scripture and contemporary signs. Everyone agreed that, whatever part the Crusaders were to play, it involved liberating Jerusalem from the infidels. So off they went. Since they were on a holy mission–in fact the last holy mission before Christ’s return–the ordinary rules did not apply. The Crusaders forced Jews to convert or else die (many were murdered). They killed Muslims indescriminately. They made sport of desecrating the bodies of their victems. They even roasted some on spits and ate them. That’s right: they roasted and ate them. It was like something out of the Book of Revelations. Which made sense, because the Crusaders believed they were in the Book of Revelations.

If you’re a native-born American, you’re probably familiar with Aunt Jemima (pancake syrup), Uncle Ben (precooked rice), and Rastus (oatmeal)–commercial icons all. They were co-oped in whole or part from stock characters in American minstrel shows, largely because they suggested to white consumers a comforting though bygone hospitality. Aunt Jemima said “You might not have a loving mammy to do your home cookin’, but you can eat as if you did.” I grew up with Aunt Jemima and loved her syrup dearly, so I knew this.  But I did not know that a similar tradition of racist commercial icons existed in Imperial Germany. I do now, thanks to David Ciarlo‘s insightful Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Harvard UP, 2011). The Germans had been using images such as the “tobacco moor” to stamp their exotic trade goods since the eighteenth century. But it was only in the 1890s that they began to use the “moor” in mass advertising per se. It was only then, too, that they began to carve out an empire full of “moors” in southwest Africa. David skillfully connects the two phenomenon, showing that the latter tangibly altered the character of the former. The image of Africans in ads went from one that emphasized the exotic to one that stressed the exotic under German domination. Depictions that were almost entirely fanciful became much more concrete. Africans came to represent racial Untermenchen in the service of their German overlords. It was an appealing picture, and one the Germans would–unfortunately–not soon forget.

Europeans like to say that “America” (aka the “United States”) is not a nation. They are right and wrong. It’s true that Americans come from all over the place, unlike, say, Germans.  Just ask an American where she comes from. She’s likely to reply that she comes from Ireland, Africa, Korea or Germany even if she has never set foot in Ireland, Africa, Korea or Germany. We Americans self-identify as a “nation of immigrants,” not really a “nation” per se. But if  Colin Woodard is right there are in fact nations in America, or rather North America.  In his terrific new book  American Nations: A History of Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (Viking, 2011) he identifies a bunch of them: First Nation, Yankeedom, New Netherland, the Midlands, Tidewater, Greater Appalachia, the Deep South, El Norte, the Far West, New France, and the Left Coast. Colin deftly traces the historical origins of each of these cultural regions and then explains how their particular character affected–and continues to affect–North American history. What this amounts to is a new and refreshing way to look at the North American past and present. And not only that. It turns out I’m a Midlander and my wife is a Yankee. That actually explains a lot…  

I vividly recall a time in my life–especially my late teens and early twenties–when I thought I could be anyone but had no idea which anyone to be. For this I blame (or credit) my liberal arts education, which convinced me that there was really nothing I couldn’t master but gave me little or no indication of  what I should do (beyond platitudes like “discover myself” and “do good”). So I thrashed about, armed with an ounce of knowledge and a ton of arrogance. I was insufferable. I won’t go into details, but let me just say my quest to discover who I was ended rather badly, albeit not in the long term. Life taught me what my liberal arts education couldn’t: that I was who I was and not much more. Having read Rosamund Bartlett‘s excellent Tolstoy: A Russia Life (Houghton Mifflin, 2011), I’m left wondering if Tolstoy ever came to this realization. Throughout his life, he searched for his true self. His launching pad was not a liberal arts education, but rather an aristocratic background, a flock of tutors, and a remarkable talent. The first taught Tolstoy that he could do anything he wanted (which was largely true as it concerned the serfs that Tolstoy’s family owned); the second  gave him the cultural tools he needed to conduct his search; and the third gave him the ability to rise above all the other Russian aristocrats who were trying to figure out what they should do and where Russia should go. Tolstoy tried on Russian identities the way you try on cloths at a department store. He was, by turns, a student, a slacker, an enfant terrible, a rake, a soldier, a pianist, a slave master, a gambler, a journalist, a teacher, a bee-keeper, a patriarch, a national poet, a peasant, a pundit, and a child-of-nature. At the end of his life he became a holy fool, or monk, or cult leader–take your pick. Some see this identity as his final destination, his moment of Buddha-like enlightenment. I don’t think so. Had he lived another five years he would have become someone else. Tolstoy–perpetual adolescent.Thankfully for us, the common thread in his loosely woven life was writing. He was a always a writer, and one with preternatural descriptive and dramatic gifts. Rosamund Bartlett is also a writer with considerable gifts, which explains why her grasp of Tolstoy is so solid and why her ability to vividly portray him so great.  If you want to know Tolstoy, read Bartlett.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Sports] Modern sports carry the DNA of the games of ancient Greece and Rome. This genetic inheritance will be most apparent next summer, when London hosts the 30th Summer Olympic Games. But these genes are also expressed any time we visit a stadium or arena to watch athletes compete. The Greeks also called a competitor an “athletes,” a word derived from the root “athlon,” meaning “prize.” The stadion was the field of competition at Olympia, as well as the marquee event at the ancient games: a sprint of roughly 200 meters. Arena, meanwhile, was the Latin word for the sand that covered the floor of an amphitheater, ideal for absorbing the blood of slaughtered animals and executed criminals (but only infrequently, as we’ll learn, the blood of slain gladiators). And even when we visit the gym for our own workout, we are manifesting our genetic heritage. The Greeks also frequented the gymnasion for physical training. But as this was ancient Greece, the exercises at a gymnasion were performed gymnos—naked. As David Potter points out in his survey of Greek and Roman games, The Victor’s Crown: A History of Ancient Sport from Homer to Byzantium(Oxford University Press, 2011), there have been only two periods in human history when spectator sports have had a prominent place in society and culture: our own modern age, and the ancient and classical eras in the Mediterranean. The parallels between ancient and modern games are numerous. The athletes of millennia ago, whether Olympic competitors or Roman chariot racers, were celebrities of their day, lauded by the earliest sports columnists (Greek lyric poets) and fan bloggers (Roman graffiti scribblers). They were also well rewarded. Olympic victors were the objects of bidding wars among competing Greek cities, similar to today’s free agency and transfer windows, while the richest athlete of any age remains the Roman charioteer Diolces, whose wealth was surpassed only by the emperor’s. There is also plenty that is surprising in Potter’s book—and hopefully our interview. The Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Latin and Greek at the University of Michigan, David has spent his career writing and teaching about the classical age. And as a former college wrestler and member of the university’s athletics advisory board, he has an inside knowledge of contemporary sports. He tells us of the links between ancient and modern athletics, the strange and gory details of past competitions, and the accuracy of films like Gladiator. Along the way, we learn about figures like Diocles, the six-time Olympic champion wrestler Milo of Croton, and the poet who was the Grantland Rice of ancient Greece. If you are a fan of the Olympics, or of Gladiator and Spartacus, you’ll enjoy this tour of the ancient world.

[Cross-posted from New Books in History] Despite its focus on education, Sally Ninham‘s recent book, A Cohort of Pioneers: Australian Postgraduate Students and American Postgraduate Degrees, 1949-1964 (Connor Court Publishing, 2011), covers a lot of ground: the waning of Australian-British ties, the rise of Australian identity, post-war Australian-US relations, and much more. The book is also personal: it details her own family’s experiences as young professionals studying in the United States after the Second World War.  The discovery of a cache of family letters led her to consider how and why Australians went to study in the United States, and how the experience transformed Australia’s own higher education system and politics in subsequent decades.  For the Australian students, American education opened the prospect of an Australia less dependent upon the United Kingdom. For the United States, then fighting the Cold War, Australian students opened the prospect of closer ties to Australia, an important ally. The book, which is built on an impressive body of oral history interviews, personal letters, and memoirs, is both an important cultural document and a very readable intellectual history.

If Edith Sheffer‘s excellent Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford UP, 2011) has a single lesson, it’s that dividing a country is not as easy as you might think. You don’t just draw a line and tell people that it’s now the “border,” for in order for borders to be borders, they have to be seen as such. Sheffer shows that for quite a number of years after 1945, the Germans in Neustadt and Sonneberg–closely situated towns in, respectively, the American and Soviet zones of occupation–didn’t really know whether the border was a border and, if so, what kind of border it was or should be. “It”–whatever it was–was shifting, lawless, contested, resented, profitable, and sometimes deadly. The Grenze at Burned Bridge was really a kind of anarchical region dividing people who were in no way different from one another but who were compelled to behave as if they were by two occupying powers. The degree to which they were so compelled differed and this made all the difference in the end (the end being 1990, the year of reunification). Years of Nazi propaganda had taught Germans to fear Communist Russians. So when the Soviets arrived in Sonneberg and began to rape and pillage, their fears were realized and they fled. When Soviets (with the help of East German Communists) imposed Stalinism and all that went with it, their fears were doubled and they fled.  And when Soviet order reduced once prosperous Sonneberg to a mere economic shadow of Wirtschaftwunder-era Neustadt, their fears were tripled and they fled. For the Soviets and their East German toadies, this “defection” was embarrassing, so they made what was an ill-defined, porous border zone into a militarized, nearly sealed wall. For anyone familiar with Soviet border policy in the 1930s, what they did in Germany is not surprising. What is surprising (at least to me) is the Americans’ and Neustadters’ response to the influx of Easterners, namely, something between ambivalence and hostility. The former wanted order on the border and the latter wanted security from the Eastern “mob.” Both took active measures to keep the Ossis out, all the while issuing pronouncements about the necessity of Wiedervereinigung. The Soviets are responsible for the division of Germany, but, as Edith shows, they had help.

We’ve dealt with the question of how racial categories and conceptions evolve on New Books in History before, most notably in our interview with Nell Irving Painter. She told us about the history of “Whiteness.” Today we’ll return to the history of racial ideas and listen to Andrew Curran explain the history of “Blackness.” Doubtless Europeans have noted that different humans from different parts of the globe look different for millennia. But it was only relatively recently, as Curran explains in  The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011), that they took a serious interest in explaining these differences in a manner we would call “scientific.” There are two major reasons for this tardiness. First, metaphysical and biblical schemes provided the primary context for the interpretation of the human until the mid eighteenth century. Second, the most important scientific communities in Europe–those of France and England–only began to examine the African in earnest at the same time that their plantation- and slave-based colonies in the Caribbean came on line in the seventeenth century. “Colonial expansion” and “Scientific Revolution” ran together, it seems, and it is in their confluence that we see the origins of modern color-based racial discourse. That discourse, as Curran shows, was first worked out in what are sometimes called “Travel Accounts,” books that look for all the world like ethnographies. Europeans wrote thousands of them about every corner of the globe (Full disclosure: long ago I wrote a book about early European ethnographies of Old Russia). These books, in turn, provided grist (or “data”?) for the scientific mills of “naturalists” back home. At the same time these naturalists were looking outward for the origins of human difference, other scientifically-minded types were looking inwards. They were medical doctors, and more particularly anatomists. They wondered why, in the mechanical sense, black skin was black, and so they took black skin apart looking for mechanisms. And of course these twin discourses, ethnographic and medical, were intertwined with a third–that centered on the ethics of the then booming Atlantic slave-trade. Europeans wondered what science could tell them about the rightness or wrongness of African slavery. This is an important contribution to an important topic. But it is also a model of how intellectual history should be done. Curran moves well beyond the parade of Big Thinkers that have long dominated the history of ideas. He reads them, to be sure, but he also reads what they read. By this technique, he moves deeper and deeper into the culture of ethnography, anatomy, and slavery in search of  the origins and forms of “Blackness.”  

[Cross-posted from New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies] Most Westerners know about the Gulag (aka “Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies”) thanks to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s eloquent, heart-wrenching Gulag Archipelago. Since the publication of that book in 1973 (and largely thanks to it), the Gulag has come to symbolize the horrors of Stalinism. Made up of a vast network of concentration camps, slave labor camps, and (according to some) death camps, the Gulag was a horrible thing indeed. Under Stalin some 18 million people were imprisoned in it; no less than 1.6 million of them died while inmates. The incredible brutality and injustice of the Gulag system is beyond dispute. Yet, as Steven Barnes points out in his new book Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton UP, 2011), the Soviet authorities used the Gulag not only to punish and kill, but also to “correct.” They invested significant resources in the reeducation, rehabilitation, and redemption of prisoners, over 20% of whom were released every year. The vast majority of Gulag prisoners did not die there; they survived the experience and (for good or ill) were changed by it. And as they moved through the system in their millions, and were transformed by Gulag incarceration, Soviet society changed as well. In this fine book Barnes tells us how.

If you’ve ever lived in New York City, you know exactly what a “pre-war building” is. First and foremost, it’s better than a “post-war building.” Why, you might ask, is that so? Well part of the reason has to do with wartime and post-war “urban renewal,” that is, the process by which the Washington, big city governments, big city banks, and big city developers came together to clear “slums” and erect modern (really “modernist”) apartment blocks and complexes of apartment blocks. Think “the projects” (or, more generally, “public housing“). In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the New York City Housing Authority supervised the construction of a lot of them. Today roughly 500,000 New Yorkers live in them. And many of them, I would guess, probably wish they lived in “pre-war buildings.” Sandy Zipp does a wonderful job of telling the story of this re-making of New York in his fascinating book Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (Oxford UP, 2010). Along the way, myths are busted (“the projects” were not built for poor folks), villains are redeemed (Robert Moses wasn’t really such a bad guy), and ugly buildings are explained (many serious people really thought tower blocks were beautiful). The book makes plain why large chunks of Manhattan (and many other cities) look the way they do and why they are thought of the way they are. Read it and find out.

When I was an undergraduate, I noticed that there were certain books that seemed to be unavoidable (at least at my liberal arts college). They were assigned in many classes, and they were discussed in many others. Reading them seemed to be a secret requirement for graduation. These ”liberal-arts essentials” included Plato’s Republic, Rousseau’s Social Contract, Lockes’ Two Treatises on Government (especially the second), Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto, Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, and John Bergers’ Ways of Seeing. Another was William Sheridan Allen’s The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922-1945 (Quadrangle Books, 1965). It explained the rise of National Socialism in a new and revealing way: from the bottom up. In Sheridan Allen’s story, the local politicians, shopkeepers, and housewives of Northeim (Hanover) moved to the fore, while Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels remained in the background. Here the locals “made history,” and they did so ways that we would all recognize from our own local communities. Charles McKinney, Jr. has written a similar book, though one with a much happier ending. Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina (UPA, 2010) tells the tale of how one small city in the South negotiated the rough transition from Jim Crow to Civil Rights and beyond. In McKinney’s telling, the people of Wilson (North Carolina) make history; Martin Luther King, et al. remain off stage. These common folks–both Black and White–discuss, argue, protest, sue, threaten, fight, organize, lobby, and vote their way to a “greater freedom” over the course of many decades. In the pages of McKinney’s fine book, we see how Civil Rights actually happened “on the ground.” I hope it becomes required reading as Sheridan Allen’s book once was.

Colleges and universities have a reputation for being radical places where tenured radicals teach radical ideas. Don’t believe it.  Consider this: the set of academic departments that one finds in most “colleges of liberal arts and sciences”–history, chemistry, sociology, physics, and so on–has remained remarkably stable for many decades. How, exactly, is that “radical?” Yet as Mikaila Lemonik Arthur shows in her enlightening book Student Activism and Curricular Change in Higher Education (Ashgate, 2011), some curricular changes have occurred, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. When I went to college in the 1980s, interdisciplinary minors and majors such as Women’s’ Studies, Asian-American Studies, and Queer Studies (the three cases Lemonik Arthur analyses) were in their infancy. Now the first is nearly ubiquitous, the second is growing rapidly, and the third is gaining steam. How did these new “identity studies” disciplines succeed in finding a place at the already-full academic table despite the residence of many stakeholders? Lemonik Arthur’s answer is complicated, but suggests that the deans are more nimble that we–or rather I–thought. Beginning in the late 1960s, they saw rising demand for courses in these emerging disciplines, some of which was signaled by waves of student activism. They responded by increasing the supply, albeit slowly. The first institutions to do so were of lessor status. Once they showed that the “identity studies” courses were viable in terms of enrollment and didn’t harm (and in fact helped) recruitment and fund-raising efforts, the more prestigious schools followed. Their status rose and the money began to flow. These two developments, in turn, allowed the “identity studies” disciplines to institutionalize, that is, to secure places among (actually, between) departments and in course catalogue. This is a fascinating study of how even authoritarian institutions (like most colleges and universities!) can sometimes prove responsive to their clients.